Mike Roberts
Province
While I don’t typically write about entertainment products in this space, I find that we — as a people, city and region — are too often reluctant to pull out the pom-poms and noisemakers and get behind a good thing.
So today I’m going to tell you about my trip Friday night through Storyeum, the largest, most significant tourist attraction to hit town since Expo 86.
Brainchild of wunderkind Danny Guillaume, founder of Petcetera and creator of a similar attraction in Saskatchewan called the Tunnels of Moose Jaw, Storyeum is a 75-minute underground history tour in some serious acreage beneath the cobbled streets of Gastown.
It cost $22.5 million to build, and the Gastown Business Improvement Association and a whack of condo developers are already doing triple back-flips over the social and economic impact Storyeum is projected to have on struggling Gastown and the larger, sadder Downtown Eastside.
Which is all well and true, but what about the show?
To be honest, I was expecting a major hoke-fest glammed up with smoke machines and lasers. What I was not expecting was the pure, magical theatre of the thing, and the eye-popping attention to historic detail.
The show starts in a circular lift that slowly descends, with 200 people aboard, into an ancient rainforest where a Coast Salish youth, the first of dozens of fine actors, experiences his Vision Quest atop a (real) rocky bluff.
Then it’s off to the Big House where salmon cures over the open fire and women in cedar-bark dresses prepare for a younger woman’s pending nuptials.
Then it’s through a dark passage, and the goggle-eyed crowd is suddenly aboard the storm-lashed Santiago, the first-contact ship of Capt. Juan Perez. As torrential rains pour down just a metre from the crowd, an actor screams from the crow’s nest: “Clear the rigging, you poxy swine!” It’s pretty cool.
Then it’s off to the Cariboo Gold Rush to meet Billy Barker and the colourful denizens of Barkerville. Around another corner and we’re underneath the towering wooden trestles that supported the “shining ribbon of iron” as it wound through Rogers Pass and ultimately made us a country.
My only criticism of Storyeum is that it glosses over (or ignores) some of our more shameful history — native smallpox, Japanese internment, the Komagata Maru, indentured Chinese labour — but this is, after all, a celebration of our history, and I suppose some selective revisionism must be forgiven.
Ultimately, Storyeum is a refreshingly unabashed — I dare say, patriotic — pom-poms-and-noisemakers salute to our corner of the country. Which is something that may have made us uncomfortable, before Storyeum arrived.
© The Vancouver Province 2004
